Electronic appliances generally comprise a plurality of integrated circuits alternately processing data circulating within the electronic appliance and stored before and after the processing by one of the integrated circuits within an area of the, or of a, main memory of the electronic appliance.
In order to control the accesses to the memory of the various electronic circuits, an electronic appliance generally comprises a memory access controller or descriptor, also known under the acronym DMA (for Direct Memory Access). The memory access controller allows the direct control of the transfer of data between a peripheral device and a memory, irrespective of the direction of the transfer, without the intervention of a microprocessor except for launching and concluding the transfer.
A memory access controller thus avoids locking up, in other words rendering unavailable, the microprocessor during the execution of certain tasks of the various integrated circuits.
An electronic appliance comprising a memory access controller generally operates with the aid of a software application implementing a timing delay allowing the sequencing of the execution of the various tasks to be carried out by the integrated circuits.
In such a system, in order to be sure of activating each of the tasks at a time when the data are accessible and in the desired form, the time delay is generally maximized. In fact, the execution of a task is often triggered while the data to be processed by the integrated circuit for the task have already been available for some time.
Such a sequencing limits the speed of processing of the data and by consequently limits the usage capacities of an electronic system.
Such a system notably has a processing speed, and hence a performance, which is too slow to allow a use for data having to be processed on the fly, such as in the case of video applications, notably for “streaming” applications.